LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS ALLIANCE

Prompted by national initiatives, including Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants, three West Region states are planning and implementing initiatives to define and measure effective teachers and school leaders. These new measures may ultimately be used to reward, develop, and ensure balanced distribution of teachers and leaders.

The new educator effectiveness requirements also raise a host of questions and challenges, such as:

How to incorporate multiple measures to create reliable metrics and how to weight different components;

What to do about non-tested subjects;

How to obtain reliable observation data;

How to communicate effectively to educators and the public about key issues;

What timelines are reasonable for piloting and refining new approaches; and

How to obtain formative feedback on implementation.

This three-state (Arizona, Nevada, and Utah) alliance is working together to address these issues.

Goals and Objectives

The goal of the alliance is to staff every classroom with an effective teacher and help teachers become more effective over time using multiple-measure systems, by:

Increasing the use of multiple measure assessments of educator effectiveness that are increasingly found to be reliable and valid.

Gathering formative feedback on new systems that is used to improve consistency and quality of implementation.

Members

Core members of the alliance include Arizona, Nevada, and Utah state department of education staff, including chief state school officers and administrators charged with carrying out educator effectiveness initiatives.

Alliance members also include teacher union representatives, district administrators, research staff at the state and district levels, and policymakers.